Summer Man (2)

“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be.”

“The Summer Man” is an episode I expect I’m going to need to revisit a time or 20 before I decide how I ultimately feel about some of its stylistic departures from the “Mad Men” norm – not just Don’s film noir voiceover narration from his sobriety journal entries, but other moments like the use of The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on the soundtrack in mid-episode, or the camera showing Don’s world suddenly feeling very far away after he has a drink in the office. 

Okay, let's do that.  We'll start with "Satisfaction". If you take sixties mythology seriously, rock and roll and especially a song like "Satisfaction" was rebellious music running against the mainstream culture. And yet this episode begins with someone in the New York Athletic Club, a bastion of the establishment, listening to the song on a transistor radio.

I think that's both wrong and right. I suspect it's wrong because I doubt anyone brought a transistor radio into the locker room at the New York Athletic Club in 1965. It wouldn't have mattered what you were listening to, it wasn't done. In polite society, no one would submit others to their musical choices like that. On the other hand, I suspect it's right in the sense that men who went to the New York Athletic Club probably listened to the song on the radio, more likely the car radio than a transistor radio. Why am I so sure of this? Because everyone listened to Satisfaction in the summer of 1965. It was on the charts all summer long and almost everyone listened to the same top forty radio in those days.

That is worth lingering on. There was a common culture in those days. There was a big split brewing under the surface that would really hit home in 1968 but in 1965 it was still intact.

Looking around, I see that most of the commentary on Satisfaction focuses on two things: the sexual content and the anti-commercialism. Not much mentioned is that phrases to the effect of "I can't be satisfied" traces back to a number of blues songs, one of which would have been very familiar to Jagger and Richards.


 
This isn't a complaint but a selling point. That he he can't be satisfied is a challenge and a (sexual) promise. That is a long way from the smug superiority of 1950s liberalism and the whiny victim olympics of post-1960s liberalism. And that is pretty much what you get from Mick Jagger's lyrics, 1940s blues swagger mixed with anti-commercial folk music attitude that sounds like straight out of a Pete Seeger song. Like a lot of brilliant ideas, it seems ridiculously simple in retrospect. But it wasn't simple. The proof being that no one else had done it before. 

And that brings me to what I consider the central question about Mad Men. Scott Adams has suggested that the Trump era is characterized be a tendency to see two different movies on the same screen. I'm increasingly convinced that Mad Men anticipated that. There were two Don Drapers. One was the one the creators seem to have set about consciously creating and the other was the one a lot of fans of the show actually saw. There was something unintentional about him. 

By "unintentional", I mean that he sprang out of the way the ingredients that made up his character were assembled rather than out of what the creators planned. 

The conventional view of Draper is driven by what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion:

I liked the idea of Don writing a diary. What I don’t like so much is having Don read to us from the diary, in a voiceover. For starters, the device undercuts one of Mad Men’s greatest strengths, which is its use of irony and understatement to show how characters word and actions often belie their real thoughts and meaning.

On this view, the real Don Draper is always someone less impressive than the false and flattering account he gives of himself. The first thing to note about this is what a trivial observation it is. Is there any one whom that is not sometimes true of. The second, more important thing to notice, is that Don is a guy who doesn't talk about himself. And it's not surprising that he doesn't because bad things happen to him almost every time he does.

That's the movie TV show half the population watched or, at least, it's the show a lot of critics watched. In this version, the surface meaning covers another, less flattering account. Well, less flattering to the people being watched; it's immensely flattering to the clever people using their secret decoder rings to interpret "what's really going on".

The other movie is an esoteric one. It too has a hidden meaning but it's a hidden meaning that has to be concealed because it would be dangerous to admit to liking this message. It's a TV show that appealed to men in an era when being a man was to be the subject of suspicion. At the centre of all this is a man. A man of action. People who dislike him say, "a deeply flawed man", as if there was any other kind.

Final note, I said above that the anti-commercial attitude in Satisfaction sounds like it comes out of a Pete Seeger song. Take a closer look at the verse the show episode uses:

When I'm watchin' my TV
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarrettes as me ...

If you remember 1960s ads, you'll know how big a part the need to fit in played: the reason you needed a white shirt was so you wouldn't stand out. You needed a well-manicured lawn for the same reason. The song doesn't object to commercialism so much as it objects to conformism. It's a declaration of ... well, a declaration of what? The natural tendency would be to end that with "independence" but that's not where the song goes next.

I can't get no, oh no no no
Hey hey hey, that's what I say
I can't get no satisfaction
I can't get no girl reaction

Now there is a concept: "girl reaction". Is that what he sings or is it "girly action"? Either way, that ain't independence.

Summer Man

I bought a new suit, charcoal grey, slim fit with a single vent, last week. I wore it for the first time Saturday. On the way to the bus stop, a hot young woman flirted with me. She initiated it. Everyone smiled. While I was standing at the bus stop guy going by in a car gave me an envious glance. He looked back at the road and then, realizing he'd lost something with that glance, looked back again, trying to appear contemptuous and superior. It didn't work.

 Feeling good, I found myself singing "Satisfaction" and thought how odd it was that, of all things should have popped into my head. And then I remembered:

"Fox Butterfield is that you?"

John Zogby rates Trump low:

"While the president continues well enough in the approval ratings, he is neither a healer nor a unifier."

Fox Butterfield is a journalist who infamously wrote that the crime rate continued to go down despite high incarceration, a man so blinded by ideology that he not only couldn't acknowledge that the latter might be a cause of the former, he had to read it as causing the opposite.

We might ask the same question of Zogby. Does he not see that claiming to be a healer or a unifier is a fools game when dealing with left politics that is increasingly determined to cause pain and division. Claim to be a uniter and they can make you a liar by punching you in the face.

Public intellectual?

Tyler Cowen, whom I admire despite disagreeing with him about some things, recently shared an old video of Woody Allen and Billy Graham debating about God and asked, "Where's Jordan Peterson?" The point being that Peterson is everywhere and, perhaps, a little too visible.

This January Cowen said that Jordan Peterson was the most influential "public intellectual" today.

That's an interesting expression. My first thought was, "Is there any other kind of intellectual?"

You might respond by saying that a university professor known only to his students is an intellectual. After all, you might continue, Peterson himself was relatively unknown for most of his career and we wouldn't want to argue that he became an intellectual by becoming famous. By that standard all popstars are intellectuals.

And yet ...

When I was a kid, Pierre Trudeau was deemed an intellectual. Growing up in a very Liberal family (meaning they were both ideological liberals and supporters of the Liberal Party of which Trudeau was the leader) I initially took the claim at face value. As time went on, however, I noticed some odd things about this intellectual. One was that while Trudeau wrote books and everyone in my parents' circle had purchased at least one of those books, Federalism and the French Canadians, nobody ever talked about what was in the book. When I picked up the copy on our shelves and read it myself, I was struck by how stiff the binding was. I suspect it had been read once but probably not twice before I got to it. And when I tried to engage people on the content of the book, they clearly had no idea what Trudeau had written.

It got worse. The more I engaged with Trudeau's writing, the less impressive it seemed. Trudeau had made much of being opposed to "nationalism" but, when you read him, it rapidly becomes clear that he doesn't clearly define what he means by the term. Worse, he is decidedly selective about whose nationalism he condemns. He is merciless in dissecting the nationalism of the Quebecois and the United States but blind to the equally noxious nationalism in the rest of Canada.

Finally, he was a fraud. He liked to accuse Quebec nationalists of having roots in right-wing nationalism of an ugly authoritarian and racist stripe. In some cases that accusation was fair but in other cases he used unfairly, even against people who had opposed that sort of nationalism back when it took real courage and integrity to do so.

As if that wasn't enough, we later found out that Trudeau himself had an ugly history of supporting the sort off hateful ideas he accused others of having done.

Now, you may be waiting for me to announce that Trudeau was not an intellectual. I'm not going to do that. He was an intellectual. He was not a very important intellectual in the long run. Does anyone read him anymore? Probably not. But he was very important to his time and, even if no one read him terribly attentively (or retentively) at the time, the ideas he cared about were much discussed because he cared about them.

When deciding whether someone is an intellectual (or whether someone or something fits into several other categories such as whether something is art) we shouldn't mix up categories. Whether they are good or important intellectuals are separate questions.

Here is what I would conclude. A university professor is not necessarily an intellectual. "Intellectual" is not a credential you get from any sort of institution and it is precisely because no institution can give you that status that intellectuals are important. They exist to challenge ideas that dominate institutions. If all Jordan Peterson ever did was repeat ideas already in favor in universities, he'd still be unknown.

So, to turn back to the question above, Jordan Peterson was not an intellectual until he became famous. Fame is a necessary condition for being an intellectual even if it is not a sufficient condition.

Rude question: What's the difference between a twink and an incel?

I posted about twinks two days ago. Walking my dog later, it struck me that, physically, twinks are very close to incels. The are small men with little muscle or hair. Men who don't look or act manly.




 Troy Sivan is gay but this is a very heterosexual video aimed at teenage girls. His being gay isn't an obstacle because the whole point of this sort of thing was perfectly explained by The Simpsons years ago:

 If you're a teenage girl just starting to think about love, there is no less-threatening choice than a small and weak gay man.




And there is nothing new about this. Here is a song that is widely condemned for it's misogyny. Pay close attention, though, and you'll notice that it's actually a very girly song. The attitude you see on display here is of a teeange girl afraid of getting hurt mentally rehearsing how she's going to deal with a breakup before such a thing is even a possibility.




It's a bitchy song about one girl who is afraid of everything: she's afraid of the boys who really want her and she's afraid of the mean girl who will steal that boy from her. That's the attitude that drives the song. That's why millions of girls bought it back in 1965. Nothing has changed. Don't believe anyone who tries to tell you differently.

"Age of twink"

There was a piece in the New York Times called, "Welcome to the Age of the Twink". If, like me, you had no idea, it's a term from the gay subculture that means a small, skinny, hairless manboy. That such a term would exist is no surprise. If there is a body type, there is a type of person with a fetish for it.

A lot of people have heaped abuse on the article and with good reason: it's poorly written, poorly argued and poorly researched. It's the last that I want to focus on. Just the title makes a claim that twinks are culturally important now. What sort of evidence is given to back up this claim? Here's a list of what I can find in the article:

1. There is one character in the movie Call Me By Your Name who fits the definition.
2. there is a Slovak porn company that specializes in the type
3. Zac Efron looks the part in a muscular sort of way
4. figure skater Adam Rippon
5. You can find a history of the type in the work of a fashion photographer named Ryan McGinley
6. You can also find the type in fashion photographs chosen by a designer named Hedi Slimane
7. Three movie stars: Tye Sheridan, Lucas Hedges and Nick Robinson plus a bunch of guys in Dunkirk.
8. Musical artists Olly Alexander and Troy Sivan
9. A German male modeling agency called "Tomorrow is Another Day" specializes in the type.

 That is one awfully narrow set of cultural references. Most of them (#s 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9) are closely connected to the gay subculture.

Even opinion journalism should be based on something. That the writer had a feeling about something, which is all we have here, is not enough.

The last Smooth Song of summer

This is very well written. It's Teflon smooth. That is to say, it doesn't stick. Heck, it barely even registers. And yet it is a supreme example of the songwriter's craft. (Yes, it did that on purpose.)

I have a funny memory that goes with this. Years after this was a hit, it was played as an oldie on the radio and my first girlfriend used it as a pretext to start talking about how she would deal with a break up. She spoke of the pain and how she wasn't certain how well she'd deal with it. And I felt for her. I had no intention of breaking up with her but we were teenagers and at that age you know, even if you don't discuss it, that it's highly unlikely you'll be together for the rest of your lives. My focus was entirely on her as I listened: I didn't want to hurt her but I knew at least enough not to make promises I couldn't keep. I felt for her.

Ah, to be that naive again. If I had a time machine I'd go back and whisper in my ear, "She's already planning her exit strategy you moron!" I spent a lot of my teens and twenties feeling sorry for women who had the moral consciences of professional killers.

The point of all this being that the lyrics of this are beyond disingenuous. She was always planning for this to end and now she wants to feel sorry for herself. Not one line, not one word of the song is devoted to any pain her ex might be feeling. She's supposed to help her deal with it and then disappear. There is a name for that sort of thinking but I use it too much so I won't actually write it here.

I've done smooth songs of summer for a number of years now and it's time to move on to something else. This seemed like a good song to end it with.